So it is the time of the year when the next Debian Project Leader is being elected. This year, it took me quite a while to vote, partly due to being busy at the University during the day and doing other stuff in the evenings, partly because there were more alternatives this year and the choice was tough.

Figuring out that Jonathan Walther would be last and `None of the Above' second-last was easy enough, but ranking the others proved to be a bit more difficult.

In fact, I still think that our current DPL, Martin Michlmayr, is pretty much the perfect person for that position, despite him being somewhat invisible as DPL during 2004: He knows a lot of Developers personally, and has good personal relations with most of the key developers; he knows how Debian works internally better than about anybody else, including spotting and trying to fix problems or motivate the appropriate people to do so (although this is sometimes are hard job) and put a lot of work into the job which was probably not visable from the outside. When I heard that he was not up for reelection, I hoped Jeff Bailey would run for DPL, but he understandably had to drop any possible ambitions once he got employed by Canonical.

I don't know Angus Lees personally (or otherwise much, really) and Branden Robinson just acts too much like a politician these days, though he was the first individual I recognized in Debian due to his witty (and sometimes sarcastic or inflammatory) remarks on debian-devel back then. Between Matthew Garrett, Andreas Schuldei and Anthony Towns, the choice was pretty tough. They all complement each other in some way and all have their different strong points and perhaps some minor weak points, so something like a blend out of them would be perfect, or all three together as a team. Speaking of which, I think Project Scud is a great idea (other projects don't have a single leader, either) and the members are well chosen.

In the end, I guess the fact that I believe Matthew has just the right balance of being cool, humorous and reasonable tipped the scales and made me vote for him first and Andreas and Anthony tied at second.